The Man from Saigon

by Marti Leimbach

  Instead, 100 miles away, she pushes her face into the ground as the landscape explodes around her. It is not the Bouncing Betty that has detonated. That mine remains like a sleeping python in her line of vision, miraculously quiet, while the onslaught of air strikes further away blast through every thought she tries to gather, so that she is left with nothing but the most basic of instincts: to make herself small, to draw in her arms and legs, curl her back, tuck her head into her chest, round her shoulders, ball her fists. Really, however, she needs to move. There is a thing called sympathetic detonation, an explosion resulting from a shock wave, from a sudden change in pressure, which is exactly what is going to happen to the Bouncing Betty if the air strike gets any closer. She begins to crawl back, enduring the combustion of bombs, a confusion of noise that comes from every direction. She feels a weight passing through her so that her bones themselves seem to catalog the blasts, so that she feels—she could swear this—her brain slosh against the inside of her skull, one direction, then another, with every blast and shock wave. She tells herself to keep moving, is engaged totally in this inch-by-inch retreat. She keeps hoping for something, but she doesn’t know what. There is just this single, raw desperate hope, like a cry from deep within her, inaudible but fully intact. It is what keeps her going.

  And then, out of nowhere, Son appears. She sees him in the thick brush, a sudden, unexpected arrival. He has come back for her, shouting as he approaches, though with all the noise around them it appears as though he is silent, that she is watching him from behind a thick wall of glass. He is in front of her, yet unreachable; he is yelling at her but to no effect; his mouth moves, his hands; he strains to communicate but the sound is only articulated in the corded muscles of his neck, the open cave of his mouth. When the bombing began he must have run back to retrieve her. She cannot imagine risking such a thing. She cannot understand how it was possible for him to find her in the thick green of the jungle. From the moment she spots him, his legs stepping high over the brush, his head shaking with the movement, his arms out balancing against the thin, odd-shaped trees, she wants to yell to him about the Bouncing Betty. But it is hopeless. He is so close and even though she is screaming he cannot hear her. If he runs into the mine, they will both be killed. As futile as it is, she yells loudly into the deafening air, pointing and gesturing and begging him to move away. But she can only watch and gesture and trust that somehow he will notice. He is already reaching for her, pulling her toward him as though she has no legs. She rises, pushing him away from the mine as she does so. Either he’s seen it or by luck he is avoiding it anyway. They run, fumbling through the brush, bent double, hands over their heads. They are together again while only minutes ago she thought surely she was both alone and dead.

  He leads her to a shelter, nothing more than a hole in the earth. The entrance requires her to push herself down a vertical shaft no bigger than a chimney, arms above her head, wiggling to force herself down, holding her breath, hearing even through the layers of earth the great swells of noise that shake through her as she plunges steeply into what might be anything at all, a man-trap, an underground jail cell, a volcano, for all she knows. She doesn’t care. Suddenly, she drops a foot or more, banging her shoulder and hip, dislodging bits of earth as she moves, scraping her cheek, and getting an eyeful of grit. She reaches a landing and scrambles for footing, sliding along a trench no wider than her shoulders until the passage suddenly opens out. She balances on the floor of the shelter, her legs askew, feeling as though she has landed in a wet grave, for there is mud and water and slime all around her, oozing into her clothes, squelching between her fingers, coating her knees and elbows, her feet, her hands.

  She cannot speak. It is hard enough to breath. She holds her knees to her chest, leans her cheek against the mud wall, and feels the wetness there, too. Son lands through the same narrow chute that she has clambered down, putting himself near her and wrapping his arms around his head, trying to shield himself from the noise. She cannot see, but she can feel the presence of others. She is spooked as much by this as by the darkness and wetness, the heat and booming explosions. She begins to tremble. She can feel the discrete measure of elevated heat between herself and someone else, one of the soldiers. Her head pounds, her shoulders shake, her arms tremble around her knees. The smell of the wet earth is like urine and like rot. It feels as though a giant is marching above them; with every blast come sprinklings of earth from close above their heads. The shelter is a boggy, unstable hole. She wonders if it will cave in.

  The blasts continue. She is sure they will throw down more napalm. She remembers what the nurse in Pleiku said about white phosphorus, how it keeps burning to the bone. She looks at the spine of cotton wood which props up the walls of the shelter, the crumbling ceiling, the dark, damp corners. If it caves in, they will all die, as there will be nobody there to dig them out. If they rush from the shelter, they will have the Willie Pete, the bombs, the jellied gasoline to contend with.

  She would not have guessed it would be so hot here this far under the earth. There is no ventilation except through the narrow shoot that runs six feet up to the surface. The darkness itself seems to produce a heat. The noise outside suddenly fills the area around them, then there is silence, then another great sound. When the bombs hit, the small bit of space they occupy seems to contract like a muscle. At those times it feels to Susan almost as though they are sitting on top of each other, as though they are inside a live animal, consumed by this beast of earth.

  As her eyes adjust she can see the outline of the soldiers. A flashlight is switched on, the same one she has carried for months now, and through its dim glow comes the face of Long Hair. He has his weapon beside him, at his ankles like a loyal dog, and is tightening one end of the flashlight, shaking it, then tightening it again. The bulb is dying but in the darkness of their shelter it casts a fair-sized glow. She can see Gap Tooth and the Thin One on either side of the cave-like walls, but she doesn’t look at them; it is the light that holds her. The light from the small flashlight given to her by Marc, who tossed it her direction one day as she was setting off. At various times she has worn it around her neck or kept it deep in the front pocket of her fatigues. If the soldiers were to unscrew the stem of it, they would find a letter written to her by Marc. She keeps the letter hidden there the way that some women keep their own love letters in jewelry cases. Nothing happens as we imagine it, it begins. The letter describes where he is, the soldiers he accompanies, how they march, probing like bait into what they believe to be enemy territory, waiting for an ambush. During the lull times, they sleep and smoke and listen to their small transistor radios. If I hear “Windy” one more time, I may have to shoot the DJ…He describes a little of what they’ve filmed, and a great deal of all the different ways in which she enters his thoughts, how she had cost him a chess game because he kept daydreaming of her. Of course it does not mention the future. No love letter does, and anyway they were always careful never to speak of the future. Of the end of the war, of the world back in America, of his wife. Now, of course, it doesn’t matter. She does not think about Marc the way she used to. He occupies a different world, one that feels far away. Nothing matters now, except what happens in this minute, then the next.

  Nobody speaks. They endure the air raid each in their own way. Son with his hands over his head, Long Hair with his head on his knees, his rifle tucked between his legs, Gap Tooth staring at the walls, his eyes glassy, the Thin One holding on to Gap Tooth’s shoulder, as though for balance.

  She watches the flashlight bulb like it is a thing alive, comforted by its meager glow. She rubs some sweat from her brow, and then there is a huge explosion so near to them she screams. She feels a spasm in her gut and begins to vomit. She is scared. She imagines what would have happened if she was still out in the brush, close to the Bouncing Betty at the moment of the last explosion. So close. She thinks to herself, I am scared to death, and then empties her stomach once again. She wipes her fa
ce with her sleeve, dabs her eyes, tries to swallow. Long Hair gives her water, for which she is grateful, but as she lifts the canteen to her lips she smells the ooze of the shelter’s floor on her fingers and vomits again. She tries to dig a hole in the earth floor to bury her vomit, but as she digs she reveals only more wetness, the ground nothing more than a thin layer above boggy, sodden terrain. She feels she must cover the vomit, but this is impossible. She becomes immediately and acutely aware of the air supply, feeling herself breathe in and out more rapidly now, her skin clammy from being sick, worried now about suffocating in this gap in the earth. Her fingers glide over the dark floor. The smell will stay with them a long time, she thinks, mingling with the scent of stale sweat and new sweat. The soldiers say nothing but look at her slightly disgusted, she thinks, as though they cannot believe they are stuck with her once more.

  As time passes, the bombing grows less frequent, then stops altogether.

  She tries to speak, but all that comes from her is a long, slow whine that she does not recognize as her own voice. It is a sound like a siren, like the stammering beginnings of a cry. The sound rings out in the well of earth in which she sits and she thinks surely she has gone mad if she cannot even make a noise with volition. Long Hair, too, must be wondering what she is doing. He gives her a puzzled look as though he, too, is confused by the strange whining. Their hearing is so distorted now, their heads ringing with the aftermath of the air strike, it is not surprising they hear phantom noises, and that sounds ring unusually in their battered eardrums. The air itself is dense and close, vibrating as the skin of a drum. She feels like at any moment the place will combust.

  She folds her arms over her knees. Son takes her hand, her arm, pulling her toward him, holding her there now that the mortars have eased, the vibrations ebbing back, the world once again left in stillness. He appears no longer to care if the soldiers see the depth of their friendship. He is covered with the same stinking mud, the same dirt and slime and sweat that is plastered over her. She is glad to have him near. She does not want to think of what it might cost him later—a man who evaded execution by claiming to be Vietcong but is now sitting with his arms around an American girl. She has no sense of “later,” of time itself. The thought of a timepiece—a watch, a clock—seems a folly to her anyway when death is so at hand. She has no idea why the Americans called in artillery on this particular patch, and wonders if it was an accidental strike, the sort that happened all the time and which usually resulted in scores of unnecessary deaths and might, this time, have caused her own.

  Through the ringing in her ears she hears again the high whine and realizes now that it is not her voice but that of one of the soldiers. Their senses have all been so distorted that it is difficult to tell what is happening, who is making what noise, whether there is a noise at all. She looks up and sees that the Thin One is crying. He is shaped so differently from most Vietnamese, taller, with long, flat bones, a tubular rib cage, a narrow head as though someone once put it in a vise. He is crying as a child might cry, from fear and confusion. She has never seen a Vietnamese soldier cry, let alone a VC soldier. He seems entirely surprised by the event himself, his face registering astonishment at the tears which spill, so that he touches his face feeling for them as one might feel for blood. He speaks to the other two, who observe him as though he has just grown gills. At last, he turns to her, his fists clenched by his chin, shaking like a crying child’s fists will shake, the muscles at his brow swelling with the effort of his emotion. He looks, in fact, like a child. Like any number of the large-headed underweight pubescent boys she sees half-naked in the villages. It suddenly occurs to her that he may be no older than fifteen.

  He lunges at her, grabbing her neck with his hands. She is so startled that, at first, she does not resist. She feels the pressure against her throat, a stabbing pain, her eyes beginning to lose focus, a sudden darkness, the whole thing happening so fast she does not have time to scream. She feels the weight of the soldier’s body, his knee against her chest. She feels herself braced against him, her hands grabbing uselessly at his, trying to pull his fingers from her throat. There is a jarring sensation as he bears down on her, her ears ringing, her eyes seeming to pop out of her skull. It happens so fast and yet each second expands into the next as though they exist now in a balloon of time in which a minute is an hour. All at once, she realizes she is passing out. The edges of her vision cloud. She cannot move her head or arms. The soldier recedes from sight, far away, then close again. Her focus wanes. Just as she thinks surely she is dying, he suddenly, unexpectedly, drops his hold on her throat.

  He topples off her and she struggles to breathe again, terrified because it appears she cannot. Her eyes feel as though someone has taken each eyeball and squeezed it like a lemon. Her throat throbs and expands. She can see again, but cannot move her head. She can hear a fight beside her and realizes that it was Son who pulled the soldier off and now the soldier is hitting Son, who kicks him in the face, the whole thing ending with Long Hair threatening to shoot them both, then grabbing the Thin One and throwing him off Son, so that he knocks into her again.

  The soldiers continue arguing loudly in Vietnamese. Son tries to talk to her, but she is still too preoccupied with trying to breathe. There is a sound like an engine in her throat and though she tries to gain some breath, it feels at first as though the damage to her windpipe is too great, the swelling too large. After several minutes she is able to get enough breath and the awful roaring noise inside her subsides a little. Some time later she is able to breathe normally, without gasping and sputtering and feeling she will be sick. She pulls herself up out of the slime on the ground and says, “It’s not my fucking air strike!” to the soldiers.

  “He is upset because we cannot find our unit,” Long Hair answers.

  “And that’s my fault?”

  “The hamlet was deserted and now we have to find the next.”

  The Thin One tries to say something and Long Hair raps him with his knuckles. He pulls back, making a great effort to control himself now. He wipes his eyes and then blinks as the mud irritates them. He is sniffling; they are all so covered in filth that there is no way he can wipe his nose or clean himself. Susan looks away. She does not care if he is upset, if he is worried or hungry or half mad with fear. If he is angry about Americans or air strikes or the whole of the damn war. She’d just as happily kill him herself right now.

  She puts the soldier out of her mind, concentrating on the dim glow of the flashlight in the corner of her vision. Son wraps his arms around her like a cape. He does not speak, nor does he need to. He has saved her life. She is certain that if he had not been there, the other two soldiers would have let the Thin One kill her. Not because they hated her or because they thought she deserved to die, but only because they were distracted and because if they cannot find their own unit, she cannot be handed over. And if she cannot be handed over to their commanding officers, she is of no value. She will eat their food and slow them down, bringing them no reward at all. But Son had been watching out for her, as he always did. She concentrates on the feeling of his embrace, on the miracle of the bulb that has not given out, on the letter hidden within the stem of the flashlight, a letter she cherishes. She is grateful that they have survived the bombings, that her throat is clear now. She reaches behind her, feeling for the still erect walls. She breathes deeply and thanks God for the presence of oxygen in the air.

  In Saigon, Son sat with her at night as she brushed her hair, getting ready for bed. She dressed and undressed in the bathroom, balancing against the walls. They had so often found sharp splinters from broken tiles embedded in their feet that they wore flip-flops in the room, the rubber thwack of their heels a background noise, like the passing cars outside. She did not hide herself from him, but nor did she go braless or wear shorts. He appeared to have no desire at all except for her company—at least, she thought this was the case. He read aloud to her from newspapers, or chatted as he fixed his dev
eloping trays, dousing negatives, watching with anticipation as images arrived on the treated paper, occasionally holding one up for her to see. Once, when she had a head cold, he brought her soup in bed, but usually after she lay down to sleep he did not look in her direction. Out of respect or embarrassment, she did not know. It was just one of the many ways they managed to live as they did in that one small room.

  Occasionally, on a particularly beautiful night during which they might be walking through the last haze of evening together, talking quietly, glad to be away from the fighting, or pleased with the outcome of a story they had covered, she felt like taking his hand. She had never done so, but it was there: the wish for an increased connection. Was there nothing more to it than that? To take his hand: what did that mean? It was innocent, she thought. Nothing more than an occasional desire to demonstrate the closeness of their friendship.

  There were times when she wondered, too, if he would ever do anything to test the waters of a possible romance with her. She did not broach the subject with him—it would have been unsettling and, after all, they spent so much time in harmony, in that familiar closeness that was precious to them both. She did not want to disturb that. In truth, weeks if not months went by without her considering whether he felt any attraction for her or, indeed, whether she was attracted to him. However, it did not go entirely unasked. Once, early on in their friendship, she edged toward the subject and he told her he knew she was in love with Marc.